


Lemony Snicket's Guide to the Internet

by Kalya_Lee



Series: our heroes vs the internet [2]
Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Gen, Happy Ending, Humour, Internet things, Post-Canon, grappling with deep-seated emotional problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 12:38:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17918975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: You might, for instance, decide to engage in a vaguely feminist discussion with what appear to be various friendly debaters, only to find yourself, not two hours later, trapped within virulently flammable discourse from which the only viable flight is death.





	Lemony Snicket's Guide to the Internet

**Author's Note:**

> More Netflix-canon than book canon, but broadly compatible with both :)

Within the wide and varied realm of travel literature, there exists a subgenre of works dedicated to guiding an inexperienced and likely unknowledgeable traveller through any number of hostile terrains. These texts provide a great deal of helpful information which, if properly read and applied, drastically increases the probability that its readers will return home alive and continuing to possess no fewer than three of their limbs, assuming of course that the reader in question began their journey with a total of four. If you were about to explore the Sahara Desert for the first time, for example, one such text might tell you how much water to bring, and which cactuses are good to consume and which are edible only in times of dire emergency; if you planned to go sightseeing in the Marianas Trench, a good guidebook might advise you in the strongest possible terms to stay at home.     

The following text is not quite a guide in any real sense, yet it has something in common with the works mentioned above, namely that it contains information concerning a dangerous and quite often deadly part of the world – for the internet, while not nearly as exotic a place as the bottom of the sea, is in many ways exactly as hostile, and contains just as many vertiginous if figurative depths into which an unsuspecting traveller may trip and plunge, fatally, headlong.    

You might, for instance, decide to engage in a vaguely feminist discussion with what appear to be various friendly debaters, only to find yourself, not two hours later, trapped within virulently flammable discourse from which the only viable flight is death. I had, on the occasion with which I here begin my narrative, made a number of such mistakes, which is how I found myself alone in the Baudelaire mansion at four o’clock in the afternoon, contemplating a slowly cooling cup of tea, a rapidly overheating laptop, and a sharp sudden leap from the nearest window with increasing alarm.

I was just calculating the optimal angle of drop that would allow me to escape with the least possible damage to both my typewriter and my legs when Violet Baudelaire came into the room.

“How are you, Mr Snicket?” she asked, smiling at me as she made her way over to the bookshelves.

“Quite well, thank you,” I answered, sliding back down into my seat and attempting to appear as nonchalant as possible since, as you might be aware, leaping out of a library window while someone is speaking to you is considered quite ill-mannered in many, though by no means all, social circles. 

Violet nodded. Her gaze slid over the table at my feet, which unfortunately contained quite a bit of incriminating evidence – a phrase which here means “the aforementioned laptop, the aforementioned cup of tea, and four books of feminist theory, none of which unfortunately had proved at all helpful in the endeavour to which I had attempted to apply them”.

She smiled again, and it seemed a little pitying.

“Klaus tells me that you’re planning on exploring social media as a possible resource for research, publication, and the delivery of coded dispatches,” she said. “Is that project coming along as well as you’d hoped?”

I considered lying to her, an act which while generally frowned upon on moral grounds is also not infrequently deemed appropriate on other considerations, including but not limited to those related to prudence, decorum, or espionage. I considered demurring, a word which here means “to politely decline to answer a question by responding only in a series of ambiguous grunts”. I considered pausing to give further thought to my answer while thoughtfully sipping my now-lukewarm tea. And then I considered the young woman in front of me, a young woman whose family had taken me in against even my protestations, and to whom I therefore owed a great deal of my happiness and quite possibly my life; a young woman who was in her twenties and mechanically minded, who was fond of technology and whose sister was, I had heard, a minor celebrity on foodie YouTube – a young woman who, in other words, could have _warned me_.

“Unfortunately,” I said, looking her right in the eye, “and between ourselves, Violet, I must admit that I’ve been Very Fucking Disappointed.”

***

One of the most difficult parts of learning a new language is coming to grips with its idioms – an act which is often made infinitely more frustrating, if also infinitely more vital, by the fact that, like grains of the coloured sand which I once bought in a fine glass bottle to commemorate a pleasant, if somewhat life-threatening, day at the beach, idioms can become exceptionally inconvenient if put in the wrong places, and are likely to get everywhere, even in locations where you may least expect to find one.

One reason for this difficulty may be that idioms tend to have meanings which are somewhat oblique, a word which here means “rooted in a single folk story involving a fox, a goat, and a piano, knowledge of which is rare among those new to the language, as said story is seldom told nowadays, and then only under a full moon”. Another reason, however, is that idioms often invite confusion as to whether they are meant metaphorically or literally, confusion which may lead to a breakdown in communication which is undeniably unpleasant and potentially fatal – as in the case of an unfortunate associate of mine, whose friends once took far too long to call an ambulance after she informed them, in a somewhat muffled voice, that she had put her foot in her mouth and was now choking.

“A vote of confidence” is an example of an idiom which is likely to cause such confusion, as it is commonly used both in a metaphorical and a literal sense. You might give someone a metaphorical vote of confidence, for instance, by telling them that you are sure that they will succeed in the daunting task which they have recently undertaken, regardless of whether you actually believe this to be true. You might also give someone a literal vote of confidence by refusing to force them out of a position of political leadership, even if they and their party have lately made several foolish foreign policy decisions which will plunge your country into a depression of one sort or another in what increasingly feels like very few days. The phrase “a vote of confidence” can also, however, be used in a third sense, namely an ironic one, such as in the conversation in which I took part after accompanying the Baudelaires – sans Bea, who was attending a class on bookbinding at the time –  on one of their twice-weekly visits to the Quagmire house one bright Friday morning not four days after the incident in the library.          

“Mr Snicket has an exciting new research project of his own,” said Klaus, after we had all settled down in the greenhouse with the tea service and spent a pleasant ten minutes discussing Klaus’ ongoing investigation into the effects of sustained political unrest on the psyche of individuals aged sixteen to thirty-five. “He is exploring the potential applications of social media in the fields of knowledge acquisition, creative production, and espionage.”

“That sounds fascinating,” said Isadora, beaming, it seemed, at me, though as my armchair was placed approximately four inches away from Klaus’ it was exceedingly difficult to tell. “How are you getting along?”

I took a sip of tea. It was at this point that a rather unfortunate event occurred, namely that I happened to catch Violet’s eye from across the coffee-table placed in the centre of our small circle, and consequently swallowed with such great and sudden force that I nearly met the same grisly end as my unfortunate though admirably flexible associate, albeit with a rather better taste left in my mouth.               

“If nothing else,” I said, once I, if not my dignity, had recovered, “I seem to have discovered a platform exceptionally suited to vociferously furious dialogue. I am currently engaging in several conversations on twitter to that effect.”

“Oh,” said Isadora.

“Oh,” said Duncan.

“Oh, dear,” said Quigley.

“Thank you,” I said, “for that vote of confidence.”

I had, in truth, begun to feel quite at home on twitter; though as I had spent the greater part of my life living both above and beneath the floorboards of numerous unpleasant yet vagabond-friendly destinations, writing reams of notes that few people read and even fewer appreciated, and generally existing in a state of nervous anticipation due to the large number of death threats I received on a weekly basis, this feeling was not necessarily complimentary. In this case, at least, the persons sending me death threats did not actually know where I lived, a fact which did make for a pleasant change.

I expressed this last to my companions, who responded by turning to me with looks of horror which they tried politely to conceal, to varying degrees of success – aside from Sunny Baudelaire, who threw back her head with a shout of laughter.

“ _Mood_ ,” said Sunny, demonstrating the fact that while vocabularies may develop alongside the persons to whom they belong, certain speech patterns do in fact solidify at quite a young age.

The conversation drifted onto other topics, including Violet’s recent and modestly promising foray into organic chemistry, Sunny’s frustrations with her latest recipe for meringue, and the Quagmires’ plans to re-landscape their garden. I assumed the latter conversation was being conducted in some kind of elaborate code, and spent a largely enjoyable if ultimately unprofitable fifteen minutes attempting to surreptitiously record it on the notepad I keep hidden in my sleeve; I later discovered that Quigley simply had, and continues to have, a great appreciation for well-formed hyacinths. More tea was poured. Klaus enquired about Isadora’s latest poetic exploits, and I had the unique pleasure both of listening to an extraordinarily talented young poet give a reading of her work, and of watching as the tips of her ears grew steadily pinker in direct proportion to her audience’s just as steadily increasing admiration.

“Isadora runs quite a popular poetry blog,” Klaus informed me, after Isadora had put away her commonplace book, to our visibly fervent dismay. “You might find it interesting, Mr Snicket.”

“It’s nothing, really,” said Isadora. “I merely find it cathartic and often enjoyable to publish my writing in a place where it might be seen by others, especially now that my brothers have agreed to stop peering into my commonplace book without express permission.”     

“It’s not nothing,” said Duncan, with an enthusiasm which could not have been entirely the result of lingering guilt, “you had two thousand and forty-three followers at last count.”

“Well,” said Isadora.

Sunny turned to me with a solicitous look. “She’s tumblr famous,” she said, a phrase which I immediately copied down into my sleeve-notepad, for later review.

Apparently the Quagmires were highly adept not only at uncoded gardening, surviving a good number of highly dangerous situations, and providing hospitality to a middle-aged writer whose already limited social skills had been somewhat worn away by decades spent with only a typewriter and a folder’s worth of conspiracy theories for company, but also at cultivating compelling online presences in their limited spare time. Quigley, for instance, had over a thousand followers on his twitter account, which was devoted largely to sharply-worded complaints about the numerous failings of Google Maps.

“It’s immensely well-liked,” said Duncan. “None of us are quite sure why, though we have discussed it several times, at length.”

“Perhaps they all have a deep and abiding interest in cartography?” I said.

Quigley smiled, a little dubiously. “Yes,” he said, “that must be it.”

“It’s your laconic wit,” said Isadora.

“At least we all know why _you’re_ popular,” added Quigley, in her direction. “Creating passable rhymes on short notice is relatively easy, but decent scansion is hard to come by.”

We sipped tea in silence for a moment, each of my companions looking as pensive as I felt, a phrase which here means “momentarily overwhelmed, as I was, by the inexplicable vagaries of persons on the internet”.

“I think,” said Sunny, leaning back in her chair, “it’s because they like to watch you swear at an influential multinational corporation for producing a substandard product, Quigley. At least that’s why _I_ enjoy it.”

“Is this enjoyment driven by your distaste for influential multinational corporations,” I asked, “or by your fondness for swearing?”

“I find that binary thinking often causes more problems than it solves, Mr Snicket,” replied Sunny. “There’s no reason why it can’t be both.”

I was forced to admit that this was true.

“Anyway,” added Sunny, “Duncan’s being far too modest about his own online presence. He just doesn’t want you to find out that he writes for Buzzfeed.”

“ _Sunny_ ,” said Violet, a word which here, I believe, meant “please cease in your attempts to antagonise this associate of ours, as he is very sensitive and has also saved our lives on more than one occasion”.

Sunny shrugged.

“I’m not ashamed of it,” said Duncan, unconvincingly. “Buzzfeed is a perfectly legitimate news organisation.”

“It’s certainly better that _The Daily Punctilio_ ,” said Klaus, in an admirable attempt to be supportive. This attempt was, unfortunately, more a case of damning with faint praise – a phrase which here means “a feeble compliment, especially considering that Klaus had, not two days previous, spent more than three-quarters of an hour extolling, to me, the virtues of JSTOR”.

Klaus was correct, however; Buzzfeed is, by most metrics, a superior publication to _The Daily Punctilio._ I had, in truth, been rather impressed to find within it a not-insignificant amount of content of not-unreasonable quality, even despite the recent unsalutary effects of a number of unethical and unwise staffing decisions. I had especially enjoyed the article on culinary substitutes for parsley soda; number six did, in fact, surprise me.

Duncan, upon hearing this, put his head into his hands.

“Always a pleasure to have you here, Mr Snicket,” said Quigley.

“A pleasure to be here,” I said, and drank my tea.  

***

When I next walked into the Baudelaire library, laptop in hand and troubled in mind, I was surprised to see it already occupied. This surprise was largely unfounded, as the library was a place favoured as much by my associates as it was by myself; feelings, however, like art, politics, and most television series, are seldom founded on logic, and it was for this reason that I started at the sight of a very small girl writing in a very large notebook at the writing-desk in the south corner.

“Hello, Beatrice,” I said, pausing by the desk on my way towards my habitual armchair. Bea looked up, already smiling – a charming habit of hers which, I often reflected, could not possibly have come from her mother’s side of the family.  

“Hello, Uncle Lemony,” she said, pulling an earphone out of her right ear. “Are you well?”

I considered this for a moment. It was only half-past eleven; I had just come from helping Sunny chop the tomatoes she would be marinating for our lunch. I had eaten a not-insignificant number of pancakes three hours prior, whilst enjoying a pleasant conversation with my hosts, including Bea herself; I had read the news, and been depressed. I had waded into another three online arguments shortly after putting the leftover pancakes in Tupperware containers, and received another four death threats, a new personal best.

“Quite,” I said, at length. “At least by my standards.”

“Ah,” said Bea, “that bad?”

I laughed, something which I had been doing more often of late, though it maintained a charming air of novelty. Bea grinned at me and turned back to her notebook, though she left her right earphone out, which I interpreted as an invitation to further dialogue. All at once the prospect of sitting down in my armchair with my laptop and continuing the research for which I had entered this library in the first place began to evoke in me violent feelings of despair.

The Baudelaire library was large and filled with furniture: aside from the bookcases, there were four desks, a small sofa, a number of armchairs arranged around an elegant coffee table, and other chairs of various descriptions placed in numerous odd corners. It was designed to feel like a home, which it did; it was also, I suspect, designed to serve the needs of four young people who might become so engrossed in reading at a moment’s notice as to forget how to move more than four paces in one direction before needing to sit down. I was no longer young, and no longer found it difficult to keep moving regardless of the circumstances, unless said circumstances involved broken limbs or a quantity of rope; yet I too enjoyed the convenience of near-omnipresent seating provision, and never more so than when I found myself able to pull a chair up to my niece’s desk with very little effort.

“I have been wondering,” I said, when it seemed that Bea had reached the end of a sentence, “whether you, too, have had any significant interaction with the internet.”

Bea looked up again and laughed, a bright incredulous laugh which made my stomach clench uncomfortably. It was not, of course, that I worried that she might be laughing at _me_ ; Bea was far too good-hearted to engage in mockery, and anyway I was already more than used to being laughed at. I was, instead, suddenly afraid that I had once again done a thing which I have done numerous times in the past, often to life-threateningly disastrous results: I had missed something.

“Uncle Lemony,” said Bea, very seriously, “it occurs to me that we have never really talked about my writing.”

This statement was unsettling in the same way that statements such as “I love you” and “my parachute has failed to deploy” are unsettling, namely that the fact that they are true becomes immediately apparent as soon as they are said, no matter how unlikely they may have seemed up to the point of their utterance. It was true that I had known that Bea was a writer, just as I had known that Violet was an inventor, or Klaus a researcher, or Sunny a chef. Yet I had never once discussed this fact with her in any detail, much less done the writerly equivalent of helping to chop tomatoes, or to hold a wire steady as it sparked uncomfortably in my gloved hands.

“Well, we haven’t been in contact for very long, really,” I said. “I did not wish to pry.”

“As I was the one who tracked down a person who I knew full well was in hiding and initiated a meeting with him over a very public root-beer float,” said Bea, “I feel as if, in this relationship, you might well be considered incapable of prying.”

In this moment I experienced not one but several emotions, all of which defied logical explanation – as is, of course, their wont.

“Oh,” I said, “that sounds reasonable.”  

“I am glad you think so,” said Bea, with a soft smile.

I took a moment to compose myself, and Bea turned back to her notebook, though I could feel her watching me out of the corner of her eye. I had, over the years, become more than usually vigilant and more than a little paranoid, a word which here means “overly-aware of the attention of other people, be they nefarious villains, officers of local law enforcement agencies, or affable cocktail waitresses”; Bea’s attention, while significantly more agreeable to me than any of these, was similarly unnerving. I did not say anything about it, however, as I was finding it somewhat difficult to speak.   

“Well, then,” I said, after the moment had passed, “what are you writing?”

“Unlicensed continuations of, or additions to, existing fictional properties,” replied Bea, with something suspiciously close to a twinkle in her eye, “based on careful analysis of those properties’ characters and major thematic concerns.”

“I see,” I said, although I did not see.     

Bea made a noise which was sounded not entirely unlike stifled laughter and gestured me over to her side of the desk. There was a tablet placed next to her notebook, largely obscured from sight from where I had recently been sitting by a small pile of pens and an oversized coffee mug; it showed what seemed to be a still image from a film.

When I had settled myself in a half-crouch next to her chair, a position which while awkward felt, to me, no more so than usual, Bea handed me her spare earbud. I took it.

“Here,” said Bea, “I’ll show you,” and pressed play. 

The still image began to move, and together we watched a scene from a popular contemporary film which I shall not name in the interests of avoiding unnecessary litigation, but which involves, among other things, memory loss, cybernetic enhancements, frankly undeniable homoeroticism, and quite possibly excessive amounts both of male angst and of eyeliner. The scene was five minutes long and seemingly designed to encourage adults to turn to younger members of the audience and ask questions like “isn’t this a little too violent for someone your age?”; as my own young companion was being raised by three children whose parents had died in a fire, shortly before her own parents had, respectively, been asphyxiated by malignant fungus and shot by a harpoon gun, I sensibly refrained from making any similarly ridiculous queries.

The scene concluded, and I retreated to the other side of the desk, a move which was entirely motivated by my desire to look at Bea without developing a crick in my neck and had nothing whatsoever to do with any discomfort with physical proximity, or related fear of intimacy, on my part.    

Bea, being as she was a person of unusual delicacy and emotional intelligence, responded only by moving the tablet to the centre of the desk so that we could both look at it at once, albeit somewhat sideways and, in my case, upside-down.

“I am currently working on a piece of prose fiction,” she said, “in which these two people” – pointing at the man with the eyeliner and the person whose face he was attempting, rather forcefully, to rearrange, in turn – “move to a farm in a rural location, and jointly open a sanctuary for abused and rescued dogs.”

“I see,” I said, again, untruthfully. “I’m sure that they will both find it very therapeutic.”

“Yes,” said Bea, with complete sincerity. She pulled the remaining earbud from her ear.

“You see, Uncle Lemony,” she said, “most people think that writing is creating something out of nothing, but you and I both know that that’s untrue. The hardest thing about writing is that it’s really creating something out of _something_ : out of the world, or out of one’s mind – or, in your case, I suppose, out of carefully-curated documentary evidence. And these things are all made of potential, of all the stories that they can be used to tell, if a writer chose to find them and put them down.”

Bea paused, and looked at me, as if to see if I was following. I was.

“I am watching this scene again,” she said, “to find something which makes my own story possible. To find the potential for a tale about a dog sanctuary, so that I can make that potential real.”

I looked down again at the tablet, with its image of destruction, bloodshed, and violent antagonism. There was nothing there that, to me, suggested anything even remotely resembling a sanctuary for dogs, even if all the dogs in question were ill-tempered pit bulls, or former members of a clandestine fire-fighting organisation. I wondered what Bea saw, and if, once she had written it down, I might be able to see it too.

I looked around me, at a room filled with books and chairs and windows and early-afternoon light. Somewhere in here, on a high shelf in a small corner, was a series of seven books with appealingly alliterative titles and handsomely patterned fabric on the spines; I had not opened a single one of them since my arrival at the Baudelaire home, nor did I have any desire to do so. I wondered now, though, what I might find, were I to take one down and begin to read – a great many libraries, I thought, but every one of them burned, or lost, or abandoned underneath a giant reflective pool. None like this one. Nothing like this. It seemed unlikely, though not impossible, that this assessment might be wrong.

“You know,” said Bea, “when we began to look for you, it was your writing we found first. I was so delighted to learn that you were a writer. I was sure it would be something we would have in common.”

“We have many things in common,” I said, not at all defensively, “including, but not limited to, a number of similar facial features, and a shared bloodline.”

“Of course,” said Bea, grinning, “that as well.”

We sat in silence for a moment. Bea put the tablet away. I watched her as she did, and as she turned back to her writing, seemingly unperturbed by the fact of my watching. We did, indeed, have similar facial features. I thought about what, if anything, that might say about me.

“I should like to read your story,” I said, “when you are done.”

“I’d like that very much, Uncle Lemony,” said Beatrice.

I did, in fact, open my laptop that afternoon, and I did eventually get online, where I found that circumstances were exactly as bleak as I had expected. I did not, however, leave my seat, and Bea and I shared a desk until Sunny came in to call us to lunch.        

***

There is a certain well-known expression which can be attributed to the sacred writings of a major world religion but which, like many other such writings, can rightly or wrongly be applied in a good many other settings, including but not limited to song lyrics, inspirational posters featuring stock photos of sunsets, and unofficial mottos for even more unofficial organisations. The expression referred to here is “in the world, not of the world”, and the organisation in question is the one of which I had, until quite recently, been a part. What this expression means is that the world is, to put it mildly, a rather nasty place; and that one should attempt to engage with it without becoming similarly nasty oneself. Such an endeavour is, unfortunately, made undeniably harder by the truth of another saying – one which is rather better-known though perhaps not as suitable for publication on an inspirational poster, namely that if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss will, invariably, find itself gazing also into you.

While the act of posting on the internet is often referred to colloquially as “shouting into the void”, in my case it often felt more like gazing into the abyss. And, on a day several weeks after my first foray into the viciously feuding domain known commonly as twitter, as I sat once more with a cold cup of tea in the Baudelaires’ library and found myself, once again, interrupted by Violet Baudelaire, I could most definitely feel the abyss staring back.

“At it again, Mr Snicket?” asked Violet. She smiled as she approached and, instead of moving towards the shelves of engineering texts and scientific journals she tended to favour, came and sat down in an armchair opposite me.

“I find that perseverance is a virtue which is both noble and practical,” I said, somewhat stiffly, and took a sip of tea.

“So do I,” said Violet, with a nod. We sat in companionable silence for a long moment – or at least I imagined that it seemed companionable to her; as I had long ago become accustomed to viewing both long periods of quiet and loud sudden noises as equally suspicious and worthy of alarm, I can rarely be called upon to judge the quality of silence in any room or theatre, abandoned or otherwise. I did my best to hide my discomfort, however, exercising a skill which I have honed over a good many years of practice, and Violet did not seem in the least bit perturbed, so I leaned back rather than say anything else, and took another sip of tea.

In truth, I had not actually been “at it again” – or, rather, I had, at time of speaking, been at a very slightly different thing. For while it was true that I had been spending rather more time than even I thought wise or sensible engaging in violent and furious disputes on twitter and various other social media platforms, I had at that moment been doing something even more ill-advised, especially for politicians, talk show hosts, women in STEM fields, and men who until recently had been on the run from the law: I had been googling myself.

After a few more sips of perfectly-brewed but sadly stone-cold tea I said as much to Violet, who, being a young woman in any number of STEM fields, responded with a deeply sympathetic look. 

“I was wondering why you looked so disconcerted,” said Violet, using a word which, here, was most definitely an attempt at generous understatement. “I hope you didn’t find anything too unpleasant?”

The phrase “a picture paints a thousand words” is not frequently true in a literal sense, unless the picture in question is of a very large page covered in very small writing; but it is often true in a figurative sense, and it was true here, as I turned my laptop around to give the eldest Baudelaire a clear view of the screen. If you google “Lemony Snicket” now, you will likely find a selection of links to various articles, one or two conspiracy sites, an extensive but highly inaccurate Wikipedia entry, and several recipes for a cake which, on the advice of Sunny Baudelaire, I have never tried. The page which had confronted me then, however, and which I had presented to Violet, contained nothing but the recipes for cake and advertisements for various unusual items of clothing in unflatteringly garish yellow shades. There was, in other words, nothing there.

Violet nodded, after a moment, and I turned the laptop back so that its screen faced me, not that it did me any good.

“There is a poem,” I said, “by a man named Algernon Charles Swinburne. It begins: here, where the world is quiet/here, where all trouble seems –”

“Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot,/In doubtful dreams of dreams,” said Violet, still smiling, but now a little wistfully. “The Garden of Proserpine. It was one of my parents’ favourites.”

“It would be,” I said. “It’s about death.”

Another silence of indeterminate quality descended as Violet waited patiently for me to continue. I, meanwhile, felt a sudden need to pause, not for dramatic effect as might be imagined but rather because I was somewhat at a loss for words, a phrase which here means “I knew exactly what to say, but not how to say it or whether I wished to say anything like it in the first place, a state of affairs which left me in a rather difficult situation, seeing as I had already begun”. I did not know, for one thing, why I had such a desire to say what I felt needed, here, to be said, and why I should feel such a need now, rather than in any of the thirty or so years in which I had been thinking it. I did not, furthermore, understand why I should wish to say such a thing to Violet; I might have imagined that it was because she looked so like her mother, but that was inaccurate, for Violet Baudelaire looked, above all, like herself.

And in truth I was not sure I could have said to Beatrice what I wished, here, to say, nor could I imagine saying it to my siblings, even if they had not been, at this point, dead. Of all the people I had grown up with, in fact, it was only Olaf to whom I could possibly have expressed how I felt, in part because he had been a despicable person and a terrible actor and therefore someone whose good opinion, which in all likelihood I had never had in the first place, I could well stand to lose; but in part because he, perhaps, would have understood. What he would have understood was this: that to be in the world but not of the world is a difficult endeavour, and that it is easier and far more tempting to avoid the world altogether, so as to better escape its taint; and that the organisation of which I had until recently been a part had excelled in a good many areas, such as espionage, library science, and the dramatic arts, but had always been poor at resisting temptation. Put more simply, it had been neither of the world nor in it; it had barely, even, been _at_ it. It had run from the world, run and hidden in a maze of poetry and research and secret tunnels, and I, in running myself, had hidden even deeper.

It had taken me some time to emerge. I was not quite sure that I had done it.

That was what I wished to say, but instead I sat and watched Violet Baudelaire watching me, and I listened closely to the sound of my own heartbeat which, as countless novels will no doubt tell you, is a sound which can signal either supreme contentment or great fear. I was not content.

“The world is quiet,” I said, at last, “when you are in a library. It is quiet, sometimes, at the beach. It is quiet when it is three o’clock in the morning and you are alone in a small and dingy motel room, and all the rats in the walls have finally gone to sleep. But it is quiet, most of all, when you are dead, and I no longer wish to be dead.”

Here I paused again, because the rest of the library had suddenly gone very fuzzy and difficult to see. My laptop felt heavy where it rested on my knees.

“I want,” I said, when I could, “to be alive.”

I knew, in this moment, that the results of a google search could by no means make me alive, any more than they could turn you into the movie star who shares your name, or help you pass your undergraduate degree. I knew that it was foolish to search for evidence of a person’s existence when they had spent the first twenty or so years of their life pretending to be unobtrusive, and the next twenty pretending to be dead. I knew, then, that I had been setting myself up for failure, all along – but then I had known this before, when I had done it. That was not and had not been the point.

Violet took a breath, and I looked up at her, blinking hard to clear the blurriness from my eyes – or, at least, from the two of them which were on my face.

“You know,” she said, “when we built this house, we made sure to include certain elements, including a kitchen, a library, an inventing studio, and three layers of fireproofing material in every interior and exterior wall. The first thing Sunny did, once we moved in, was to prepare all of us a delicious and nutritious lunch, which Bea helped to bring to Klaus on a plate, as he had already ensconced himself in the library.”

She paused – this one, I believe, was indeed for dramatic effect – and I nodded, waiting for her to continue.

“I,” she said, “did not step into the inventing studio for nearly four months.”

I was surprised by this, just as you no doubt are as well, assuming of course that you have read my chronicle of several unpleasant years in the lives of the Baudelaires despite repeated and insistent warnings not to do so. If you have, you have no one but yourself to blame for any ill effects; I, on the other hand, was well used to blaming myself, and so devoted all my attentions instead to ensuring that my surprise did not show on my face. Judging by Violet’s wry look, my efforts were not entirely successful.

“I had invented the fireproofing material myself, on the island,” she said. “That was one of the reasons why we decided to come back. And I had invented a new, more efficient fire extinguisher, and we had one installed in every room. I even found a way to fireproof books without damaging the pages or the bindings, and had aerosolised the mixture required so that we could spray the library at regular intervals. I had done all these things before moving into this house, and having done them, I found that the studio felt somewhat redundant.”

Another pause. I took another sip of tea, which had remained at room temperature.

“What,” I asked, “made you change your mind?”

Violet smiled again, and leaned back in her chair; and it was at this point that I realised that she had tied her hair back, ribbon curling around her ears. There was something I could make of this, I knew, if I were, as I was not, at all inclined to try.

“It was Klaus’ birthday,” she said. “We were planning a party. We’d invited the Quagmires, Sunny was catering, Bea helped to decorate, and I realised that we didn’t have a gramophone. So I built one.”

She looked down at her hands, twining her fingers together; she looked almost shy, and I wondered, suddenly, if the story she was telling me was a happy one. I would have been surprised if it was, as I had heard so few happy stories in so many, many years, but to my slight unease I became increasingly aware that I would have been surprised, as well, if it wasn’t.

As it turns out, I was indeed surprised, for it was both.     

“I built a gramophone,” said Violet, “and it worked perfectly, and I enjoyed it immensely. And after I had built it, I went back to my room and sat on my bed and cried for about an hour and a half.”

I nodded. I, too, have had some experience with such matters.

“I cried because I realised,” she said, “that I had forgotten. That I had once built things that were not grappling hooks or battering rams or drag chutes, that were not schemes or last-ditch plans or disguises. I had built machines to turn pages in books, and to add colour to black-and-white-films without permanently changing the reels, and to play music. I had built a better toaster and a more efficient television. I had built things for no reason. And I was remembering, suddenly, that I had once forgotten how.”

The world had gone blurry again. I retrieved a handkerchief from my jacket pocket and, having availed myself of its services, handed it on to Violet. She took it.

She said: “The Quagmires don’t know about this. Neither does Sunny, or Bea. I haven’t even told Klaus.”

“But I am telling you,” she said, “because I trust you. And because I think you will understand: I had forgotten, but then I remembered. There is more to the world than fire.”

We sat in silence for a long moment, silence that even I, with my limited abilities, could tell was heavy, and weighty, and significant. After a while I looked up, and so did Violet, and we met each other’s eyes.   

“There is a phrase,” I said, “which describes a long and exceedingly vehement form of discourse occurring on such sites as twitter, tumblr, and reddit, which often contains an excessive amount of profanity and ad hominem attacks.”

The phrase in question is “flame war”, an expression which is extremely evocative, a word which here means “useful as an explanation for why I felt such a strong urge to fight them and also why, given my particular personal history, such an urge was clearly and visibly dysfunctional to everyone but me”. From the look in Violet’s eyes as she smiled I could tell that she knew the phrase, and understood the joke, and thus understood what I understood, namely that she understood me.

“Get Bea to show you some cat memes,” she said, “she’s quite the expert” – a suggestion which I later followed, and thus came to learn what the phrase “cat memes” means in general discussion, though here it meant that just as there were many ways, both literal and metaphorical, in which to fight fires, there were also other ways of being online, and in the world.

That, however, was later; for now, and at the end of this story, I simply shut my laptop, and watched Violet untie the ribbon in her hair.

“Come to dinner,” she said, and I did.

***

_Lemony Snicket is a freelance writer who has written pieces for Mic, Vox, and the Daily Dot. In his free time he might be found posting about cats on tumblr or reading good poetry on a hillside. He lives with his family by and large in one place, as he is, thankfully, no longer on the run. You can find him on twitter at @limeysnick, or on Facebook, though he does not guarantee that he will add you back._

  

 

 

  


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